"Serving West and East Village, Chelsea, SoHo, NoHo, Little Italy, Chinatown and the Lower East Side"

Volume 77 / Number 31
Jan. 2 - 8, 2008

Editorial/Op-EdTrust must clip heliport’s wingsIn a long-overdue move, the Friends of Hudson River Park and other waterfront advocates have sued the Hudson River Park Trust to force the W. 30th St. Heliport’s relocation.

At the MUD Coffee shop on E. Ninth St. last Saturday, Texas natives Jeffrey Adams and Andrea Burghart enjoyed conversation as Burghart sipped a cup of joe. MUD is the East Village’s self-professed anti-establishment Starbucks alternative.

Trying to find a new formula to tame the spread of chainsBy Patrick Hedlund
Astor Place has always acted as a gateway to the East Village, but the tiny stretch also marks a nexus of another kind: where a trio of Starbucks coffee shops sit within a few hundred feet of the intersection.

Helicopters are hellish, plus illegal, suit chargesBy Albert Amateau
Friends of Hudson River Park and other waterfront advocates went to court on Dec. 11 to close down the W. 30th St. Heliport saying the noisy copter pad is illegal and should have been kicked out of its current spot in Hudson River Park years ago.

E. Fifth neighbors want even tighter lid on hotelBy Albert Amateau
Members of the E. Fifth St. Block Association are fighting the Cooper Square Hotel’s application for a liquor license for a second-floor outdoor terrace that extends a scant 30 inches from the window of an apartment in a tenement next door.

Waterfront activists try to keep a firehouse afloatBy Josh Rogers
At Community Board 2’s Waterfront Committee meeting on Dec. 17, Fire Department officials outlined plans to demolish the firehouse on a finger pier at Gansevoort Peninsula in favor of a modern facility for Marine Company 1.

ARTS AND LIFESTYLEThe accidental assassinBy Steven Snyder
The degree to which Andrew Piddington’s “The Killing of John Lennon” will enthrall audiences is proportional to how close those viewers felt to the one-time pop icon; how devastated they were in the days after his cold-blooded assassination at The Dakota in December of 1980.

Put on a ‘Smiley Face’By WILL McKINLEY
Calling a movie “the best stoner comedy of all time” might be considered faint praise. After all, other recent entrants in this category have been about as funny as a $50 bag of Washington Square Park oregano. But with “Smiley Face,” a slapstick farce starring a sleepy-eyed Anna Faris, Director Greg Araki has single-handedly redeemed a genre that has heretofore considered repeated utterance of the word “dude” to be Algonquin Roundtable-worthy wit.

Up close with the master of modern-day portraitureBy Stephanie Murg
An artist sits before a painting in progress and pauses to appraise his work as the smoky voice of Etta James wafts through his Lafayette Street studio. He goes right for the periwinkle, loading up a brush with oil paint and then daubing onto the canvas a large dot, the smallest in a series of brightly colored concentric circles, like those that floated through the work of the Delaunays and Kandinsky. The form is beautiful on its own, but take several steps back and a miracle occurs: a massive grid of these softball-sized abstracts combines to form a stunningly photorealistic portrait of a face you want to scrutinize for hours. Behold the mastery of Chuck Close.

Who wears Jane Jacobs’s mantle in today’s New York?By David Halle
Though not its avowed intention, the Municipal Arts Society’s terrific Jane Jacobs exhibition offers material for a long overdue re-evaluation of the famous urban scholar. While her sky-high reputation amongst most people who care about cities is in no need of revision, the exhibit affords one a chance to grasp exactly what she stood for and did, and in the process determine who is really entitled to claim her mantle in today’s New York City.